AND we’re off on the childish charade that passes for a Westminster General Election. Actually, British politics has been off for quite some time – so much so it’s really pretty rancid. There are two-month-old cartons of milk that are fresher than Westminster politics.

We have another seven weeks of wall-to-wall Westminster, and all because Theresa May has decided the public don’t want another independence referendum because of the uncertainty, but they do want a General Election.

May has called this election after saying she wasn’t going to, in order to give her the mandate which she has said she already has, so that she can negotiate something that this time last year she said was a terrible idea that would ruin the country.

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May has made more reverses than a ro-ro ferry.

Still, we should congratulate her, because she’s made an important contribution to the science of astrophysics with her discovery of the largest object in the universe, that would be the U-turn nebula, composed of particles of hypocritum. It’s simultaneously intensely dense and yet it exists in a vacuum, so very much like David Mundell, come to think of it.

Having foisted on an unsuspecting public a General Election no-one outside Theresa’s office wanted, the Prime Minister then announced she wasn’t going to debate with any of the other party leaders.

Theresa has always struggled with the answer part of the question-and-answer equation, and she most certainly isn’t going to put herself in a position which is even worse than exchanging barbs with other politicians, and that’s allowing members of the general public to ask her a question.

They’re far less forgiving of non-answers, and giving non-answers to questions is the only political skill that Theresa possesses.

The public would ask her important questions instead of the meaningless ritual that passes for PMQs. They’d ask her crucial and relevant questions like: “When was the last time your true reptilian form changed its human skin?”, or “Do you have a favourite migrant community to hate, or does your understanding of equal opportunities mean you demonise them all equally?”

Although if I could ask her a question myself I’d ask, “How did you manage to survive falling into the reactor core of the Death Star?”

This entire election is an exercise in Theresa May’s vanity. It’s all about her crushing the opposition on her own back benches and the Remainers in her own Cabinet. There’s no need for it. She’s not lost any votes in Westminster and in order to justify calling the election she was reduced to bigging up the massive threat to her authority posed by nine Lib-Dem MPs. They could block the processes of parliament, she gushed. Although the only way that would be possible would be to ask Tim Farron about gay rights and he would turn himself into so many knots that Westminster could be tied up for years to come. There are some small mercies however. We’re only a few days into the campaign and already Ukip are not having a good election. There’s no point to them any more now that May has turned into Nigel Farage in a Vivienne Westwood trouser suit and pearls.

After suffering more electoral failures than Murdo Fraser, Nigel himself has announced that he won’t be standing for a Westminster seat this time round. He’s fully occupied with his seat on the BBC Question Time panel. It’s the only safe seat Ukip will ever have.

Farage’s Ukip press statement contained the nugget that he wanted to concentrate on his position as an MEP, although that’s not unusual as Ukip contains a lot of nuggets.

Apparently Nigel is of the opinion that he can get a hearing in Europe that he can’t get at Westminster.

If only he’d told us all that before the referendum he could have saved us a whole lot of bother.

Labour are out of the starting blocks. Ian Murray, the party’s only MP in Scotland, at least for now, has put out election information already, informing his constituents that he’s terribly busy dealing with more than 700 emails from them every day.

The fact he’s so busy answering emails explains why he’s always abstaining instead of voting against Tory policies in Westminster. However, 700 emails a day works out at more than a quarter of a million emails a year, and there are only about 65,000 voters in Edinburgh South. So either Ian’s got some extremely enthusiastic correspondents, or he’s counting all the emails from a Nigerian prince asking for his bank details in return for a share of US$15 million.

Jeremy Corbyn has ruled out doing any deals with the LibDems or the SNP. Instead he’s running the election campaign he’d like to run if he was a Latin American revolutionary campaigning against an authoritarian dictator. Which, to be fair, isn’t that far from what we’ve got in the UK these days.

Unfortunately, the ideological purity of the message is somewhat muddied by the fact that while Jeremy is campaigning for a revolution against the Tories, his colleagues in Scotland are advising people to vote tactically for the Tories in order to keep the SNP out.

It’s a bit difficult to paint yourself as the Che Guevara for the 21st century when your pals in Scotland are giving people the same advice as Katie Hopkins.

This is a first-past-the-post election, and the reality is that a pro-indy vote for anyone other than the SNP is a wasted vote. There’s only one way to create a revolution in British politics, and that’s to vote SNP and then vote Yes in a second Scottish independence referendum. Then maybe we can have proper grown up politics, and not Westminster’s childish charade.

Ipsoregulated

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